My Kiwi Experience Part 2:a smelly town, a churchy town, and marine magic

After my all my Taupo sky diving excitement, I made my way to a smelly little town called Rotorua- smelly due to the sulfur dioxide, byproduct of all the geothermal activity. I didn't really mind, plus it makes a perfect cover story for farts. You see, comedy aside, Rotorua sits on top of some of the thinnest crust in the world, and so geysers and thermal pools and mud pits are extremely common. This made it a really important place to the Maori people, and so now, it is also one of the major places to have a maori "cultural experience", which is basically busing in loads of tourists, watching a show of traditional dancing, singing and the haka (war cry dance thing), and then a huge buffet, or hangi, which is supposedly cooked traditionally, which I'm sure it was, but I doubt they ate much chocolate cake and cornbread stuffing back in the day. They also took groups to see the glow worms that populated the forest, and to their sacred spring, which was in fact, very lovely. I had a nice time.
The next day I was off to a thermal park, with more of the same maori stuff, but now with boiling pools! and steam! and mud! Yeah, it was exciting. I hopped a flight to Christchurch, and met up with parental friends, Frank and Belle, who were to put me up (or put up with me) for the next few days. They stuffed me full of home cooked home grown meals and took me walking about Christchurch, which is, I must say, a really nice city. It is up there with Luang Prabang for my most favorite. There was something that I wanted to do, so I slipped away yesterday to go to Akaroa and swim with the Hector's Dolphin, the smallest (and therefore cutest!) and rarest marine dolphins in the world.
The day was crisp, and so, of course, the water was freezing. After 'gracefully' donning my wetsuit and hopping in a small boat, the captain gave us instructions: "Keep your self upright by doing a cycle kick, and put your snorkel under water and make all sort of sounds. The dolphins want to be entertained." WEll, I guess any excuse for me to act like an idiot, so here I was was, in 40 degree ocean water, cycle kicking, making barnyard sounds into my downturned snorkel, spinning around to catch sight of an fins breaking the surface. Just as I started to suspect that they simply enjoyed watching us act stupid, there they were, a big pod, swimming all around us, checking us out, presumably enjoying our snorkel concert. Four came up to me, swam around me twice, and man, that was a really special feeling. I grinned the whole bus ride back.